Viking Farms In To Sweet Battery Mineral Resource
Viking Mines’ subsidiary Viking Critical Minerals has entered into a farm-in agreement with Flinders Canegrass, a subsidiary of Flinders Mines, to acquire an equity stake in the Canegrass battery minerals project in Western Australia.
The project contains a JORC inferred resource of 79 million tonnes at 0.64 per cent vanadium oxide, 29.7 per cent iron and 6 per cent titanium oxide.
Under the terms of the agreement, Viking can earn up to 99 per cent of the six project tenements for all minerals by spending $4m on exploration over 54 months and making staged cash payments for a total consideration of $1.25m to Flinders.
Upon Viking earning a 99 per cent interest in the project, Flinders has a right to sell the remaining 1 per cent to Viking in return for $0.845m of staged production and milestone related payments due on production. If Flinders does not exercise this right, Flinders must offer to sell the remaining 1 per cent interest to Viking on the same terms.
Viking Mines managing director Julian Woodcock said the company had conducted extensive due diligence on the project and believes it has major potential to add value to Viking shareholders through:
Significantly growing the existing resource base via direct extension from outcropping mineralisation with targeted drilling programs
Assessment of the previously unevaluated nickel, copper and cobalt potential through estimation of current data, inclusion of new drilling data as collected and undertaking preliminary metallurgical testwork
Discovery of new resources by following up high grade surface rock chip samples
Undertaking metallurgical testwork to confirm and advance on the preliminary testwork previously completed to produce a vanadium concentrate and vanadium oxide flake
Benefitting from the growing position of Western economies that vanadium supply is dominated by Russia and China which is driving a desire to reduce dependency on these high-risk sources of this critical mineral.
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